


Child of the Forest

by lferion



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 1, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-01
Updated: 2012-03-01
Packaged: 2017-10-31 22:48:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/349189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lferion/pseuds/lferion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Young Jabe goes for a walk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Child of the Forest

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kass/gifts).



> Many thanks to M and A for lightning beta and cheering on.

* * *

  


Jabe was barely a sapling the first time she encountered the Tardis. (Of course she had no idea at all that was her name or anything like that.) Jabe was newly mobile, just past seedling-hood and still finding her legs and figuring out how lovely and different the world was when you could see it from other perspectives than through the glass of the nursery. 

The grove — orchard really, or small not-quite-wilderness — of fixed and silent trees that grew green and sturdy in the folded sweep of rising ground behind the blank back wall of the conservatory had beckoned from the first moment she had properly seen it. Finally granted a measure of unsupervised and unstructured time to herself, that grove was one of the first places she explored. Of course the grove was not truly wild, not so close to the nurseries and conservatory on the estate, but it was by far the wildest and unpruned area Jabe had yet seen. There were vines and trunks and branches growing every which way; small bushes creeping along the ground sprouting random and unexpected twigs and tendrils; mosses and ivies and things with thorns as well as flowers. 

The still greenness drew her on, further into the misty distances. Her now outgrown but not yet shed rootlets tasted the rich dampness of the soil, the savored the bright, hard pebbles and soft pockets of decaying leaves with tiny new shoots poking up to reach the damp air. There was a kind of quiver in the smell of sap and leaf and bark, a hum that sang along the network of twined roots, interlaced branches. Something deep in the grove was astonishingly, gloriously, inexplicably Present, alive like a shout of silent thunder, an explosion of invisible energy.

Jabe crept around the bole of a tree much larger than she was and peered through the curtain of overhanging branches into the small clearing. In the center was the strangest thing Jabe had ever seen. She knew without doubt that it was the source of the feeling that had led her here. It was a deep, vibrant blue, the color of the sky at second moonset in summer, but richer, more alive. There were marks of white set in lines, and panels, edges, surfaces and planes in angles and arrangements that were different from the curves and branches she was used to, but that only made it — no, _her_ , not it — more compelling, more distinct. Jabe moved out from under the drooping branches and stepped into the misty shafts of light filtering down through the thin upper canopy, feeling the warmth of the sun on her face and her thin brown limbs, the springy coolness of the moss under her feet. The strange square blueness was still calling her, so alive, so Present, so wonderful that she had to go right up to it and press her hands as wide as they could go against the flat face. 

She was like a tree, and not, like the engine that ran the house, the little-sun, the shields and the cleaners and all the other things that kept the estate safe and warm and growing. Jabe could feel time and space and all manner of wonder under her fingers, and somehow she knew that threaded through all of the whirling wonder of her was love. A fierce, wild, protective love for the spirit that grew and lived in-with-along with her, like a charis-vine and a pearoak, supporting and protecting each other, only both alive, aware, individual as well as connected. 

"Grow," it seemed the warm wood under her hands was saying to Jabe, "live, and learn, small one. Hold fast to wonder, rejoice in love. Grow, love, live, fly free."

"I will," Jabe whispered back, her forehead pressed to the wood that was so much more than wood. "I will. Thank you."

Jabe was not the least surprised to feel the energies surge and sparkle around her as she stepped back, the air fill with wind and vibration and a crescendo of eager sound. Jabe reached the edge of the clearing as it reached a peak of intensity and shifted, suddenly no longer entirely there, the blue fading into the greens and browns of the far trees.

She was gone, but oh, the entire _universe_ was out there, beautiful and terrible, bright and dark, full of amazing things. Jabe knew that someday, she would go out into that universe, and fly.

***

When Jabe stepped from the shuttle onto Platform One, she heard-felt-tasted that indescribable Presence once again, as fresh and immediate as if it had been mere days instead of decades since she had last perceived it, and knew that whatever else, this event would be more than even the organizers had planned. She felt like a sapling again, stepping out into the Great Forest.

  


* * *

  


  


* * *

**Author's Note:**

> The picture was taken by me at the [Morris Arboretum](http://www.business-services.upenn.edu/arboretum/index.shtml) on a lovely misty day.
> 
> This story owes somewhat to a tale I read many moons ago -- Indigo by RJAnderson. The description of meeting the Tardis for the first time has stuck with me, influencing my sense of her ever since.


End file.
